Bill Rice and Mike Carroll launch Make the Logo Bigger, a podcast about marketing from inside Kaleidico, a full-service design and marketing agency. This week we talk about why you MUST consider content management when you’re doing web design.

Speaker 1:

0:00

Welcome to make the logo bigger. We're a strategy first company, right? So as everyone should be, I mean you got to start with your objective and then Kinda work your way backwards from there. The podcast that takes you behind the scenes of a marketing agency conscience is getting so much more expensive. We just got to figure out more economical ways to provide that service to clients from two guys that get paid to do this stuff on a daily basis. People love behind the scenes type stuff. They want to see how you work. You know, they want to know more about your process, so be open and honest. Here's your host, Bill Rice. Usually the best ideas don't actually sit within where you are. They usually come from somewhere else, and Mike Carol, you need to design first and then create content to the design, and now the obligatory legal disclosure.:

Speaker 1:

0:41

Bill Rice and Mike Carol worked for Kalydeco, a marketing and design agency. All opinions expressed by bill and Mike are definitely the opinions of Kalydeco opinions expressed by guests of this podcast. Well, they could be right or wrong. Who knows? This podcast is for informational purposes and has a reasonable probability of making your marketing better. And now this week's episode, our rate, this is our first episode of podcasts from Kalydeco. Um, I've got a, my carol who's our president and a creative director, I guess, and I'm here, the founder of Kalydeco and we're gonna talk a little bit today about why content management should be actually part of your core web design. So Hey Mike, how are you?:

Speaker 2:

1:28

I'm good. Bill, how are you? And for everybody listening, I called bill and I will constantly call Mbr. So that's what I'm talking to you and I say that, but yeah, that's one of the byproducts of slack and these sorts of things. You get a truncated and initialize. So. Alright, so let's jump right in with the kind of, the initial question we wanted to talk about. This is coming up a lot is we, uh, we. So we build a lot of websites. I'm fairly complex, uh, websites and a lot of times they're, as, as are most things on the web these days, heavily content driven. And so we've run into several situations and client experiences where the default position is really to do a beautiful web design and a lot of times the client is not thinking about content, content management. So Mike, you want to Kinda sorta characterize maybe a client story or something along these lines of kind of what happens when we don't consider the content or even more importantly, the content management. How are we going to manage content over time?:

Speaker 3:

2:27

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think one of the things that people think about content management, I'm in the wrong way. I think when people hear content management, they think like workflow or process management in other words, um, you know, like who approves a piece of content to go on the website. And it was in a client meeting not too long ago and they were worried about like access levels for wordpress users. And I told them, I said, look, I think we're thinking about content in the wrong way. You can have is a website that facilitates the publication of any kind of content. It's not just like, you know, approving a blog post or approving this, it's making your website into a tool, uh, as you say, vr all the time that facilitates documentation. Um, and so when people think about their content management strategy, I think they need to think about who's going to be using their website and how they're going to be using it.:

Speaker 3:

3:14

And when I say who, I don't mean external users, internal users that are they going to be able to publish a new page, are they gonna be able to publish a new post? Can they upload video? Can they aggregate social stories? Is that a part of your content strategy? So when you go and you look at building a website, one of the very first things I think you can consider or should consider is how are you going to be using content on your website on an ongoing basis? Because a lot of people, and this is probably a separate conversation, right? But a lot of people think about their website is this static one time thing, a little snapshot of the business, right? Yeah. And it never evolves. And, and that's not the case, uh, you know, your website is more like an employee, uh, in a sense like a virtual employee by the way. You don't have to feed it, it works all the time. Um, you know, it's the marketing team's best horse so to speak, but it has to change and learn and adapt as your company changes and learns and adapts and your content management strategy or how your content management system is actually set up a is going to facilitate that.:

Speaker 2:

4:15

Right? And I think that's a lot of times when people come to us with a web design project or redesign of their website, they're, they're just, they're literally trying to capture maybe in a traditional sort of collateral sort of way, uh, the status of that business and the products they have and the services they have and they don't really think about, um, the, the, the way that it's gonna move and live and breathe over time. Like what kind of, what are some things like talk through maybe a little bit about some of the ways that we try to, to start that discussion early and kind of pull that out of them and get clients to start to think about content and kind of a living way as it goes into the design.:

Speaker 3:

4:54

Well, you know, the, I think the first thing that we try to run our clients through is, you know, what is your strategy first company, right? So as everyone should be, I mean, you got to start with your objective and then Kinda work your way backwards from there. And what we try to understand or get our clients to understand is all the campaigns you want to run, all the social strategy you want to run, all the things that you want to do on the Internet starts with the content on your website. And it's the, it's the hub by which you syndicate content throughout the web. You know, um, it's got to live somewhere. I mean, I guess you could have a medium blog or something like that, but that again, that's a different pocket. So I think that the most important thing for our, for what we try to get our clients to do is to know, to think about, think about their team as, as a storyteller and, and what kind of story you're going to tell, how often you'll be publishing content.:

Speaker 3:

5:40

And then furthermore, like we're on the website, do you want that content to show up? A content management system isn't just a way to like upload and publish content. We use wordpress a lot, uh, Aquatica, we work in other, you know, other platforms, but we're, we're pressed experts and we always recommend it. And the beauty about wordpress of course, is that you can publish a piece of, in one place and syndicated across your website to give context, um, you know, create funnels and created ultimately better user experience. But if you don't think about that beforehand, it's really hard to retrofit a, you know, then your shoe or your hamstring or shoehorning design elements in later on and your website ends up becoming a Frankenstein. I think that's the biggest, the biggest worry with content management from my opinion, is that if you start with a static picture and then you think that's going to be the end all, be all as you start to realize your website needs to change. Once you're all done, like let's say six months out, your website a isn't going to look like it's supposed to look anymore, you will have ruined it a and then b, like I said, it'll be a Frankenstein. It'll be disorganized. You know what I mean? It won't be clear to the user where they're supposed to be going or what they're supposed to be reading. Um, and then you're going to be back to square one by the way, waiting for a new website redesign. You've just wasted all that money.:

Speaker 2:

6:47

Yeah. You just start bolting, bolting things on and then it becomes unusable. And I think that kind of leads into one of the things that I've seen as kind of a really good trend. If you watch a lot of these early stage startups, um, obviously the web itself has become more powerful and kind of the old model was, um, in a more traditional companies as you have a salesforce and that salesforce goes out there and they usually have some, some static collateral that they're trying to put in front of customers and prospective clients and those sorts of things. But if you look at any of these sort of scrappy startups, what you're actually seeing them do is they're putting the sales process onto the website and then they're using the website as a tool even to the point of facilitating, you know, early stage demos in the sales funnel and those sorts of things.:

Speaker 2:

7:30

I think some of our more traditional clients need to kind of take on and think of the stuff that used to sit on an internet to facilitate the salesperson pulling that stuff down and distributed or deploying it. Uh, these, these scrappy startups, they don't have a salesforce, so they don't have the ability to do that. So they're actually using their website, uh, as a sales tool and they're putting all of that content and updating it and showing their credibility and building trust with that content. But that means it has to be living and breathing their, their publishing every day. They're making tweaks and updates to the landing pages, they're facilitating demos, they're putting, you know, a lot of different types of media. Um, and I think a lot of times we'd go into design process. We don't like what would we have to do it to this web design in order to make it not look just horrible as we constantly do that daily or weekly, um, input and publications and those sorts of things. So:

Speaker 3:

8:25

I think you wrote it. I mean, you're a great blog post about minimalism in, in, you know, in design when it comes to websites and like why you want to approach your website design from a minimalist perspective. And, and one of the points that I think is really important that you bring up is that actually not, you know, you, you, you remind people that buy a minimalist website has a clean and sort of elegant design. It feels elite by the way, when you're not, you know, providing, let's say, like the entire phone book of information to your, to your potential user or your potential client. But, but more importantly, a, a minimalist web design allows your website to be free and easy to grow as it needs to grow and change or you know, as it needs to evolve that:

Speaker 2:

9:04

images and all this kind of stuff.:

Speaker 3:

9:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It gets a little nuts when you get in there. And that. And that becomes because if you want to publish content regularly, which you should, and you should make it a part of your process, um, is you have to make it simple and easy to assemble that content a number of different ways. And that has everything to do with how your content management and set up out of the box. Wordpress is not going to get that done for you, right? So if you're talking to a web design company and they're not asking you about your content practices, your content strategy, if that's not something that are being considered a higher new company immediately.:

Speaker 2:

9:38

Great. And I think too, like talking about minimalism, not to go down this rabbit hole too much, but I think it lightens the load too and I think you really have to think about when you're, when you're coming out as a company and trying to do a redesign is like what are you good at? Um, if you've got a character or personality and your company and they're good at getting in front of camera and shooting video or whatever, like lean heavily on that, or you have a video production crew that can, can help with that. Or maybe your product lends to that. Then lean on that. But if you're not, if you can't take photos, um, and you don't know how to pick stock photos well, or you don't have to put those on your website that don't put that as part of your design right here.:

Speaker 2:

10:13

Lean on what you're, what you're best at and what you can deploy. So, um, if you're gonna do audio, you're going to do a podcast or something like this or like I said, you're a good writer and you want to kind of express yourself there figuring out like where are you going to lean a instead of forcing something in there that you're going to do poorly and it's just gonna look awful. I mean, I can't tell you. I looked at the website the other day and it was just full of stock photos and I just didn't trust the company because it was all the same stock photos that I live and breathe with every day when we're looking for stuff. And um, there was no personality, you know, you know, it's just like these, these, you know, weird a European folks that are pumping their fists, you know, it's like.:

Speaker 2:

10:53

But anyway. All right, so let's, uh, let's jump away from that a little bit and kind of wrap this part of the segment up with. And I know this is a challenge for us, so we should kind of talk through some strategies that we use is like how do you actually get that content or an understanding for that content or, or just to kind of pull out of the client what, um, what the can or will do in the future with content. What are. Because that's like pulling teeth even just trying to get copy. Yeah. I think you touched on it with a needle, right? It's like everybody wants the big beautiful website design, which is very popular now driven by photography, but 95 percent of the clients that we ended up dealing with don't have:

Speaker 3:

11:33

assets to focus on that. So I think the first thing is in being honest with yourself, uh, is like, okay, how much content are really reproducing on a regular basis and why am I going to pay somebody to produce content? What does that process really look like? Like you said, if it's, if we're writing a lot, then great, then you know, then great type of graphical design and all those sorts of things. The ultimate point I'm making is that you need to design and then create content to the design. It's a whole process that you know everyone wants their website up tomorrow, but you really gotta take your time to understand what content is absolutely necessary and then create the right piece of content for every single part of your website and the best way to do that. By the way, it's starting out with wireframes so everyone wants to get to the pretty picture or whatever else.:

Speaker 3:

12:16

What you should start off with is headlines and layout, so if your agency is writing that copy, that's great. Then they can show you kinda the overall message by starting with just the headlines Layout and then you get a sense for how much copy or how much content, whether it's images, video, podcasts, whatever is going to fit in each component or part of the website, and then you go to design and then you write your copy back to design and you flow the copy into the design and then you go to development. That's probably a convoluted way for a lot of people to like to understand it, like they think often we get like a giant document of copy if we get anything at all by the way to your point the are, but if we get a giant word document of copy and you're like, this is the copy for the website with like zero thought to design, you know, zero thought to user experience, a zero thought to conversion by the way, like where you want your users to convert, you know, what piece of content it's actually going to drive them to take an action and then you've got a retrofit, that huge word document into a design and it never worked.:

Speaker 3:

13:13

So you got to flip the process. Right.:

Speaker 1:

13:14

It's always too many words too, like when you're trying to jam in like, you know, a thousand words into what should be maybe 50, you know, so that's always a fun process. Alright, let's. Yeah, let's. Okay, so let's switch, switch, switch gears here a little bit. Um, I think that's so important and we leave out content so much and it's just, I mean, if you look at any website, the content is, is really, uh, is a heavyweight and driver on design. You're listening to kaleidoscope make the logo bigger podcast. You can find this on the web at [inaudible] dot com. K A l e I o.com. Now back to the show. So let's switch gears a little bit. Something sort of fun. Um, so the biggest challenge or rabbit hole, uh, that you went down this week and I'll, uh, I'll, I'll lead with mine. Um, so we, uh, we do a lot of lead generation:

Speaker 2:

14:11

kind of websites and a working on a couple projects actually right now and we as a part of that, a lot of times we'll, we'll start with seo to kind of give it a foundation or search engine optimization to give it a foundation and then we can do some paid strategies later once that. Um, and so one of the tricks there is to kind of as economically as possible, produce a lot of content and valuable content. So the worst thing you can do is just like shove stuff in there that doesn't add any value or it doesn't add anything to it. And so I've been amazed at the amount of data that's available out there, a list of things, um, uh, statistics, uh, about certain things. Um, and so kind of the rabbit hole that I went down is how to take a raw data like tens of thousands of pieces of information and be able to systematically or programmatically build that into a database and deploy it as pages with value added.:

Speaker 2:

15:10

So the worst thing you want to do is just take a list of something and then just make, you know, 10,000 pages that just simply put a couple of lines of text on there, but to really add some value and manipulate that data, add some extra information to it. Um, and, and really think about like, if somebody is looking for that piece of information, what's of the next step and being able to do that on a massive scale and add value. So of course Google knows that, that we're actually doing something useful, not just littering the Internet. So that's, that was kind of a fun exercise and I think I'll, I'll be thinking and using that a lot more instead of trying to make these one off content or article pages, which is hugely expensive.:

Speaker 3:

15:52

Yeah, just. Yeah. Just so everyone understands what you're talking about, you're actually talking about programmatically creating content, you know, by leveraging public data on the web. Right. So in other words, in Polish, you know, just to make sure even even I understand, I think I remember this particular client which is, you know, the idea is to pick up little tiny pockets of traffic without having to pay a writer to write 10,000 articles but to provide some sort of value to the user by aggregating, you know, whatever it is they're looking for a, you know, how, how do you do that if your, you know, is that a strategy? Do you think everybody can use or is this really specific to like, you know, to, to particular verticals?:

Speaker 2:

16:31

Yeah, I think, I think you should always, and this is not where I've always been, but where I'm kind of starting to lean to, I think the first thing we should think about is like what are the, what's the type of data that might be my customer early in the funnel is looking to figure out or come across. I'm a perfect example of this is directories and things like yelp and these kinds of things have done this very well. But um, so there are obviously looking for like a list of recommendations of let's say restaurants or whatever, but what can you and, and a yelp is a perfect example of this is they actually put a whole bunch of information they put. People can come in there and make reviews. They've got the menus there, they've got the times, the schedules. And so they probably started with somehow scraped or got access to a list of like all the restaurants in a particular community.:

Speaker 2:

17:18

Um, and then programmatically they built a page for each one of those restaurants without actually going around and asking all the restaurants this information. And then over time they were able to add more data and more value to it either through public sources or purchasing data or whatever. And at the end of the day you have this nice, I'm very valuable process that says, hey, you know, I'm in Detroit, I want to try, you know, one of the best restaurants in this particular category. Okay, what are the recommendations? What do people like the most? Okay, now are they open, are they available? Can I get a table, you know, all those extra things. And so you start to layer that. But the start was just, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of records. Then you programmatically built those pages so that they can become valuable over time and in any incremental entry in yelp now probably gets them. Now it's massive. But at the beginning maybe he only gets two or three visits a day, but then it was valuable. And then over time that aggregates we got, you know, a 100,000 of those pages and you get two or three hits. Now you're talking about, you know, two or 300,000 visitors that. But again, you've got to add value to it. You can't just throw up a bunch of addresses, a restaurants and hope that I'm going to give you any sort of traction.:

Speaker 3:

18:33

Yeah, I think it's funny that you mentioned that I had a client a while ago. They're assigned company, um, you know, like an upstart sign company that's trying to sort of be a challenger brand designs like vista print or east signs or build a sign or sort of these large, you know, online and signed creators. And one of the things that I was showing to them, which is east signs in particular, if you go look at their website, they're doing the exact same thing, right? But they're letting actual products drive the programmatic creation of pages. So no matter how small I'm sitting outside of everybody and you can hear that plane above, which I'm sure is like, I wish I was fine instead of podcasting. Well, yeah, I wish you were taking me out of flight instead of. Fantastic. We should talk about that a little more.:

Speaker 3:

19:17

By the way, everyone should know that bar was in the air force and I've never got the chance to. I never got the chance to fly with them, but something tells me it would be an exciting experience. But anyway, so, you know, east signs is basically what they're doing is no matter how tiny the vertical, right, no matter how specific the vertical from like the type of business down to even the type of sign, like, you know, a frame birthday signs or you know, truck signs for auto body shops, whatever it is, they're creating the products and then the creation of those templates or products is driving programmatically the creation of each of these little individual pages and those individual pages. And then picking up, just like you said, you know, 10 visitors a month, 15 visitors a month, five visitors a month, but they've made, you know, 10,000 of them.:

Speaker 3:

20:01

So not only are they speaking really specifically to very small and hypertargeted audiences, uh, they're just picking up all these little tiny pockets of traffic where there's absolutely no competition whatsoever. It's really clever way to create content. And, and to your point Vr as we've worked together over the past, you know, almost six years now, it's not something that we necessarily considered. I mean, it's not a new tactic. People have been doing this for a long time. I just think it's more possible now with sort of like the availability of development resource so you can find someone to build this thing for you if you've got a good idea how to programmatically create content, which is really:

Speaker 2:

20:37

totally, totally well. And I think the other thing, and to kind of wrap this up and get curious to hear your rabbit hole this week or challenge. But um, I think the other thing is just conscious getting so much more expensive. You just got to figure out more economical ways to provide that service to clients because people don't realize like what, you know, what an average article or a video shoot costs. It's just, it's very expensive. So anyway, so where did you get a good run into challenges or, or get distracted this week?:

Speaker 3:

21:06

Yeah. So the, they're sort of two that I'd like to mention. Maybe we only get to one of them, but, so the first one is, um, you know, we've got a client that basically wants to the running an influencer campaign and they really want to aggregate and pull in dynamically a influencer created social content onto their website by Hashtag of course, because these influencers are posting everyday on instagram and, and facebook and twitter and on youtube in fact, and they're, you know, they're publishing constantly. So in order for us to kind of go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out not only how to connect each influencer to that website, but then pull dynamically from each of their social presences and then publish only the relevant content to that particular brand or by Hashtag, um, at first we thought it would be something that would be relatively simple.:

Speaker 3:

21:49

Uh, but as it turns out, by the way, instagram and you know, and facebook obviously who owns instagram is really locking down their api to the point where you can't do that. So they're not even accepting requests, uh, for you to pull hashtag based content. So now we're having the like retrofit this, you know, this scenario that is going to have to involve us pulling all the content, then programmatically filtering it in our own database and then producing, you know, the visible product on the website and doing that every day or even twice a day or three times a day. So, you know, our development teams got to build this like restful api that's going to be hitting the, you know, hitting their social channels all the time. But even that's going to be a problem because they limit you so you can only. Instagram for example, is like the biggest API nightmare.:

Speaker 3:

22:33

Uh, according to Angela who's our lead developer, uh, that he's ever seen because even if you pull all their content, you only can pull the most recent posts of 30 of them. So if, so, if this influencer is publishing content all day long and they publish once on Hashtag for this client, then they published 29 other things. Nothing's gonna show up on the website anyway. So we're going to have to push, you know, speaking of content management, by the way, and this is why you think about things like this, we're going to have to go back to the client and alert the end of the fact that a internal content manager is going to have to be manually aggregating these stories if they really want the website experience to be cleaned from a user perspective so there won't be much dynamic pulling, um, but we are going to build it in such a way that'll make it as simple as like dropping an embed code or url into the backend of a wordpress site and then he'd be able to build these sort of like beautifully socially aggregated stories around the Hashtag that they're doing. So that's been, that's been more of a rabbit hole than I ever expected it to be. A in a, you know, it continues to get deeper as we go. You know, I should know more today about that.:

Speaker 2:

23:34

It's interesting how the Internet has kind of gone through a cycle. I know it's kind of early days. It was so complex and technical that you had people like aol creating these, like gonna controlled walled gardens or whatever, and then they got massively open like everybody wanted an open internet and open interfaces yet rss and these sorts of things. And now we're kind of swinging back to these walled gardens. People like, you know, like some people come onto facebook and never leave, right. They don't experience the actual Internet and instagram and twitter are all trying to compete for that. So, um, so that's kind of a cool setup as well. So, um,:

Speaker 3:

24:10

I think they want to own the data, you know what I mean? I think that's because that's the biggest asset from all these social companies, right? It's not like it's not even the monthly daily users or anything like that. So the data that they aggregate for their advertising platforms, the data that they aggregate that they, I'm sure sell, you know, to other data companies on like who you are, what you like to buy, you know, all that kind of stuff. And the more that they let other people pull information from their platforms, the more democratize that data becomes and maybe the less value it has a, you know, I'm not sure if that's exactly the case, but it seems to me that that's why there's this move to kind of lock down the platforms is they're really just want to keep these people there to be advertised to as opposed to facilitating communication, which is what altruistically all these companies started out doing in the first place. That is not, you know, facebook wanted to change the world. Now they're just letting you know, Russian bots metal with our:

Speaker 2:

24:58

electric. Yeah. Now it always comes back to the dollars at some point. Okay. Let's, um, so we're running a little bit close on time. So let's rattle through some of these other things they're kind of important to talk about and give, give our listeners a little bit of a base of, of sort of things they should be thinking about. So hottest trends, content types and that sort of thing that you're seeing.:

Speaker 3:

25:20

So, you know, it gives you a tube, one for small to medium sized businesses and it hasn't changed much as recently, but it's video, video, video, so there's lots of new services out there that are allowing companies to create video pretty cheaply by the way. Uh, and we talked a little bit earlier about, you know, documenting what you do as opposed to writing or creating content about you. Do you just document what you're doing with an iphone even. It does not have to be the highest production quality. People love behind the scenes type of stuff. They want to see how you work. They wanna know, they wanna know more about your process. So be open and honest about, you know, documenting what you're doing and how you're doing it. And then find small, cheap editing services that'll take that content and then generate some piece of like, you know, valuable video, whether it's a short explainer or something like that. Video is economically accessible and people hate to read. So figure out a way to make video a part of your content strategy. Don't, don't overthink it.:

Speaker 2:

26:16

Like, I mean, I think Gary Vaynerchuk is probably the kind of the lead on talking about documenting versus, you know, shooting something that's going to orchestrate it or whatever it's people are most interested in like kind of the behind the scenes and what you're doing and there's kind of this voyeuristic thing. And so, you know, the less you're hung up on trying to overproduce something, I think the more valuable and interesting that your client base is going to get behind that:

Speaker 3:

26:41

content. Yeah. Think the thing that people have to remember right, is that like they're so focused on making sure that each piece of content, particularly video because it used to be so expensive. I mean insanely expensive. Um, you know, it has to be absolutely perfect, but here's the reality of the situation. Whatever type of content you're creating for the web, right is like, is imminently exhaustible. I mean the, the, you know, the, the whole Internet moves so fast and people's content streams move so fast. If you put out a bad piece of content or something that isn't exactly the way you want it, don't worry about it. Everyone who saw it's going to be made by lunchtime. So we prayed about it for sure. Um, oh, um, for large for large businesses real quick, I won't go too far into this because it's super complicated and we can save it for another podcast. But personalization, personalized content experiences is like the big deal behind a large enterprise, whether using something like demandbase just like to do account based marketing where you're actually speaking directly to particular verticals based on their Ip address and all that kind of stuff. But figuring out a way to personalize your content that speaks directly to user intent without them having to ask you for it is really the big trend on the, we'll call it the advanced content as well.:

Speaker 2:

27:50

Um, okay. So for me, uh, and this is the kind of super interesting, obviously we're doing it, uh, so we just started a podcast. Um, but ironically enough, I'm probably more than a decade ago, uh, I was involved in the early earliest stages of podcast and we've watched it go through a cycle, was hugely difficult, uh, to, to actually deploy a podcast. You had to figure out a way to record it. Pretty much had to be in the same room. I'm actually, Mike and I are in complete different locations. Right. And we've got some crystal clear trying to get the quality of the audio was huge and then once you actually had it produced, you had to like do all this, like almost coding manipulation or exactly cody manipulation to put it in an rss feed to get it out there and do a podcast and all this stuff.:

Speaker 2:

28:35

And now that's um, so it almost killed it, um, for, for a long time it just kinda went to sleep and then of course apple and some other places, uh, sort of pick these things up and made it easier to, to actually do the production and to deploy it. So I'm kind of, I'm excited and intrigued by the resurgence of podcasting, which in the best I could observe almost died. Um, but a super, super cool a content type and format, especially with people commuting and all these sorts of things and trying to get healthier and everything. I mean, podcast is kind of a really convenient format for you to consume a lot of interesting comments or content without, you know, spending a lot of time, so sort of plays in the background. So, um, so does jump from that. Yeah, go ahead. We:

Speaker 3:

29:25

believer vr because he was not, you know, the endorser of podcasts. I have a hard time like listening to them while I work, but as you know, as you remind me because I'm working at home and I don't drive a car anymore. So maybe if I spent more time where I needed to be distracted and paying attention things, I think podcasts would be awesome. So I'm very excited to see, you know, how we were excited to show people and to see how it works for us. Uh, you know, as a lead generation tool, which is, I think a lot of people are looking at podcasts now and uh, and as a teaching tool, whereas, you know, the biggest ones these days are probably more on the, on the entertainment side, but it's a, it's a great way to consume content. Screen. We had to learn on the fly and I'm thinking, no, I'm excited. I mean, it's definitely, it's a great educational tool. He:

Speaker 2:

30:06

picks stuff up and what's going on. But I think it's also a relationship building tool. I mean, I've seen a lot of these folks that start like we are and then overtime they build relationships and collaborations and that sort of thing as they pull other experts into, into the format. So, um, so what's your favorite part? Actually? Um, oh actually I'm really kind of enamored with. I'm a, I'm a big investor on my part time job or whatever. So a O'shaughnessy has one investors field guide actually don't know the name of the podcast itself. Um, I should probably have looked that up. But uh, and then meb faber, who was another investor who does a podcast and those are two that just, I don't, I don't miss any of them. And then just actually the one that kind of inspired this, uh, was animal spirits, which is a brand new one by Josh Brown who are, are actually, it's right holds wealth management.:

Speaker 2:

31:02

Josh Brown is, people might know him from CNBC, it's his firm, and these are two guys that, um, that are within that from a and Ryan holds wealth management, has been just an incredible sort of wealth management company that has built everything just as prolific content creators. I mean Josh Brown, downtown, Josh Brown as he likes to call himself. It was just a prolific prolific blogger, a himself, a place in CNBC, a prolific on twitter. Um, and then of course now they're doing podcasting. So that's, that's definitely, uh, my current favorites as those, those three, and they're all investing. They're completely out of. That's the other thing that's cool about podcasts if you, if you do, do you do most of us have other interests. It's a great way to kind of get out into those other interest areas and, and provide some depth because usually the best ideas don't actually sit within you where you are.:

Speaker 2:

31:59

Um, they usually come from somewhere else. Like there's not a lot. Actually, this is the ironic thing is we were building for this. There's really not. I mean there are some good ones obviously, but there's not a lot of good kind of marketing podcast so we'll see if we can try to try to help that or maybe it will just become aware of them as we start talking off the cuff here. So, uh, alright. So let's carve through, um, actually I'm gonna skip, we were going to talk a little bit about particular areas of content creation, but I think we'll skip over. That will probably is a big topic. Well, I'm sure we'll hit content over and over again over time, but let's wrap it up with, uh, the week's top recommendation. So every time we're going to talk about things that we've come across and then we would recommend to other people. Check out. So Mike, what's yours?:

Speaker 3:

32:46

Uh, so I'm always up for a distraction. We all work very hard during the day, so, so often my recommendations are probably going to be the ones that are less helpful from a business perspective and more helpful from like a, you know, a relax yourself perspective. So I recently, and I'm probably late to the party, started watching and finished a altered carbon on Netflix a, this show is fantastic. I love shows that talk about the future, this dystopian future that they create. An altered carbon is terrifying. Uh, basically just so people know, it's a, essentially what human beings have been able to figure out how to do is transfer consciousness from one human body to another, which they refer to as sleeves. So essentially you can live forever, um, if you build a clones of yourself and so on and so forth. But as a result of that, there's been this huge chasm created by the poor and the rich, uh, which by the way, I'm not a socialist. So, uh, you know, maybe under like understand or appreciate those types of messages in the, in the thing. But really the future is some of it is what I love so much and it's, it's got great action scenes and all that kind of stuff. So if you're looking for a little cotton candy experience to kind of wind down your week, I highly ranked:

Speaker 2:

33:55

since you went there, I'll give a one that I just saw this weekend and it's completely out of any genre that I usually kind get attracted to, but I'd heard a lot about it. So I went and checked it out with the cloverfield effect, which is a sci fi horror flicks sign, a kind of idea, like a rip in the time continuum sort of thing. And then they get kind of mashed together and they're parallel universes and so it's Kinda cool to kind of inject the horror concept into a Scifi movies kind of cool. I like Scifi but horror. So it's kind of not my thing, but they did a nice job blending those. I'll give you my other two that I planned on just because I think they're a little bit counterintuitive. Um, I've just noticed over the last couple of weeks that just like my life is littered with all kinds of tools ever notes, um, you know, base camp, just all kinds of different stuff.:

Speaker 2:

34:46

I've tried different, a hemingway writing systems and stuff like that and I've just kind of come back to, like, should just simplify everything. And so google docs, it's just been my new friend. I do my to do list in there and do my writing in there. Um, I do everything and just kind of, I'm a little bit on this bent of just simplifying all my tools so that only have hopefully like one or two things that have to get into. And some of that is a reflection out of reading. Just finished up deep work by Cal Newport. I'm out of a recommendation and it's super interesting as you would expect the, I mean the book is about how to get deep and how to get really focused. Um, but he's not, um, a lot of these sort of books like this, they get sort of tyrannical about like absolute, like you have to just go, like go off into a cabin in the woods and. But he's very realistic about what's possible and what's not. And just kind of figuring out how to those. Those snapshots are periods when you are trying:

Speaker 3:

35:38

to deep work what are some kind of techniques. So it was kind of a cool, fun, fun read. So. Alright, any closing comments, Mike? We'd win it just a tiny bit over our 30 minutes. But uh, just kind of fun actually. We have these conversations all the time. We just never recorded.:

Speaker 3:

35:55

Well and to your point, like we talked about earlier, it's all about documentation. So, you know, I love this because these are the conversations that we enjoy having have to have, um, you know, almost every day and so often, you know, we wish we could play them back for our clients. Uh, you know, because in the moment you seem to tend to say, you know, the thing that you actually wanted to say and then when you go back to explain something to somebody, it never comes out exactly how you would have originally intended to. So I love the documentation part of this. Um, you know, hopefully at some point it'll help minimize some of the conversations I have to have with clients. I'll be like, hey, let's go listen to episode six of this podcast. It'll explain, explain everything you need to know and then when you've listened to it and consumed it, come back to me and tell me what you think and maybe we can all spend a little more time doing it. A little less time debating. All right, so we're going to wrap this episode and get it in the can and:

Speaker 1:

36:44

obviously that we're getting started here. So give us all the feedback you can on all the places that he had downloaded this and tell us what we can do better or what you'd like to hear from us. Topics, uh, improvements, whatever. So we just want to hear and make this valuable. So reach out to us and we'll catch you next week. We're going to rule. We'll have these every Wednesday. Um, so just look for us once a week on Wednesday. Hope to see you in the next episode.: